Chapter 10: Desperate Reassurance
The heat woke me.
It wasn’t the stale, trapped air of the barricaded bedroom. This was internal, a furnace lit deep in my core, spreading out along my limbs until the sheets felt like sandpaper. I was slick with sweat, my heart drumming a frantic, insistent rhythm against my ribs.
Ellie shifted beside me, a low, restless sound in her throat. Her skin, when my arm brushed against hers, was scorching. “Amy?” Her voice was thick, fuzzy with a sleep that hadn’t been restful.
“I’m hot,” I muttered, stating the obvious, my logical mind scrambling for a cause. Dehydration? Infection? But the sensation was too specific, too localized, a heavy, aching pull low in my abdomen. A memory flickered—biology class, a diagram, a cycle. Twenty-eight days. But ours had stopped. The world ended, and our bodies had, mercifully, shut that down. Or so we’d thought.
A groan came from the girls’ room down the hall. Not a groan of fear or pain. It was frustration, raw and physical.
Ellie sat up, pushing her damp hair back. In the slatted light from the blinds, her face was flushed. “Do you feel…?” she started, then stopped, her eyes wide. “Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh.”
We stumbled out of bed, the floorboards unnaturally loud under our feet. The metallic scent in the air wasn’t just old blood or rust. It was us, a pheromonal fog. We found Nancy and Mary in the hallway, both leaning against the wall as if for support. Nancy’s curls were a wild dark cloud around her face; Mary had her forehead pressed to the cool plaster, her short blond hair damp at the temples.
“What is happening?” Mary demanded, her voice strained. “Is this a shared stress reaction? Some kind of contaminant from the Quick-Stop?”
Nancy just shook her head, her breathing shallow. “I feel like I’m going to crawl out of my skin.”
We moved to the front room, to the high, narrow window we used as a lookout. We needed distraction, a focus. Anything.
The street below was a tableau of ruin and quiet decay. And then we saw him.
He was one of the newer ones, clothes less tattered, skin less gray. He shambled in a slow, uneven circle near the wreck of a station wagon. His pants were torn at the fly. And he was visibly, obscenely erect.
We stared in a silence broken only by our ragged breathing.
“Well,” Ellie said, her tone absurdly conversational, “that’s… new.”
“It’s a physiological response to extreme neurological disruption,” Mary recited, her engineer’s mind fighting for purchase. “Random firings of the autonomic nervous system. It doesn’t mean… he can’t…”
“It’s a problem,” I interrupted, my own body thrumming in a sympathetic, horrifying vibration. My practical mind, hazy with want, began to piece things together. “If they’re… functional in that way. It changes the threat model. Aggression patterns could be altered. Increased.”
“Mom, can we please not do a threat assessment right now?” Nancy whispered, her knuckles white where she gripped the windowsill.
We watched the thing below. A perverse, horrible idea was forming, born of equal parts desperation and a logic so twisted it could only exist here, now, in this heat.
“Our options are zero,” I said quietly, not looking at them. “We have no… prospects. No future. This,” I gestured vaguely at my own body, at all of us, “is a biological imperative with no outlet. It’s going to drive us mad. Make us sloppy.”
Ellie’s hand found mine. Her palm was searing. “What are you saying, Amy?”
I finally looked at her, then at our daughters. Their faces were mirrors of my own conflict—revulsion, need, a terrifying hope. “We need a specimen. For study.”
Mary blinked. “You want to… capture it.”
“Not it. Him. If we’re going to understand this, we need to. And if he’s… viable…” I couldn’t finish the sentence. The conclusion hung in the sweltering air.
Nancy let out a shaky breath. “You’re talking about farming.”
The word was ugly, clinical. It smashed the last pretense of romance, of normalcy. We weren't talking about love or even desire. We were talking about resource acquisition. Livestock management.
“We’re talking about survival of a different kind,” Ellie said, her artist’s mind seeing the horrible shape of it. “It’s monstrous.”
“So is everything,” Mary replied, her voice flat. “The rice, the peas. Phil. The crowbar. It’s all monstrous. This is just a new equation.” She turned from the window, her eyes meeting mine. There was no light in them, only a dark, pragmatic resolve. “The vodka. It’s a depressant. Could slow his motor functions further. We’d need a secure containment vessel. The old tool shed in the back. Reinforce the door.”
The plan unspooled from there, a grotesque parody of one of our supply runs. Lure, disable, secure. We discussed it in clipped, technical terms, our words cutting through the fever-haze. The need inside us, acute and screaming, had found a direction, a terrible purpose.
As we spoke, the creature below finished its listless circle and shambled towards the mouth of the alley beside our house. Towards our backyard.
“Timing,” I whispered, the engineer in me taking over completely. “It’s now or we wait for another opportunity. The odds of another subject presenting itself in a viable state are unpredictable.”
Ellie looked at each of us—her wife, her daughter, her step-daughter. She saw the same fierce, horrible will to live that had carried us through the Quick-Stop. She nodded, once. A artist committing to a dark, necessary canvas.
“We use the last of the vodka,” she said. “The good stuff Nancy found.”
We moved quickly, the ache in our bodies converting into a sharp, adrenaline-fueled focus. We were hunters now, with a singular, unspeakable quarry. The sunlight through the blinds cut across our determined faces as we gathered our tools, not for sustenance, but for a far more primordial kind of harvest.
The zombie with the erection had reached our gate. He paused, his head tilting as if scenting the air.
Maybe he was. Maybe he sensed the four burning women in the house, planning his capture with clinical precision and desperate hunger. We watched him from the shadows, our breaths synchronized, our hearts pounding a unified, relentless beat.
The plan was set. The world outside was dead, but something in it, and in us, was painfully, dangerously alive.